Places for the Spirit

Traditional African American Gardens

A mystical and spiritual portrait of African American folk gardens in the South

Places for the Spirit is a stunning collection of more than eighty fine art photographs of African American folk gardens—and their creators—in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. Through her patient search up and down small-town streets and dusty rural roads, award-winning photographer Vaughn Sills has unearthed an important element of American landscape that is quickly disappearing. These landscapes have a unique historical significance due to the design elements and spiritual meanings that have been traced to the yards and gardens of American slaves and further back to their African heritage.

In the spirit of outsider art traditions, the roots of blues music, and other folk manifestations, these gardens have a unique aesthetic and cultural significance. The gardens are places to socialize and be creative, but they also have mystical purposes: bottles and plant pots are put on tree branches or intentionally placed in the garden to capture evil spirits; pipes are placed vertically in the ground to allow the spirits of ancestors to communicate with the living. In the deceptively casual or whimsical arrangements are subtle and symbolic reminders of the divine in everyday life and the cycles of the natural world.

Places for the Spirit is a powerful testament that adds greatly to our understanding and appreciation of a vanishing element of African American culture.

Accolades

Winner of the Christian Science Monitor Best Gardening Book Award

Winner of the Garden Writers Association Best Photography Book Award

Winner of the Bookbuilders West Book Show Certificate of Merit

Praise

“Every once in a while, a unique and wonderful book appears. [This] is one of those extraordinary books.”
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— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“What she captured with her camera is the depth of meaning that these gardeners intended.”
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— Washington Post

“Looking at these black and white images sometimes feels like dropping paper flowers in a glass of water and watching them expand. Vaughn Sills's images make the mind expand like a rose, fragrant with vision.”

— Hilton Als

“The photographs and Sills' sharing of the gardens and stories of their creators, in such an extraordinary and beautiful way, testifies to a remarkable documentarian and artist, and a visionary capable of stepping outside the fences of ordinary aesthetics into a realm of magic.”
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— Oyster Boy Review

“The art was never easy to find, materializing like night blooms in the woodlands and graveyards of rural black communities. Vaughn Sills, a Boston-based photographer, learned to look near historic downtowns, on the black side of the railroad tracks. And yet, she said, she had put perhaps 3,000 miles on rental cars in order to find 150 traditional African-American yards and gardens. Many of these appear in her beautiful 2010 book, Places for the Spirit.”
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Hilton Als is an American writer and theater critic who writes for the New Yorker. He is a former staff writer for the Village Voice and former editor-at-large at Vibe magazine. He is the author of The Women, and his work has appeared in the Nation, the Believer, and the New York Review of Books. His honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, and the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin. He has taught at Smith College, Wesleyan...

Lowry Pei is the author of three novels, including Family Resemblances, and numerous stories and reviews in publications such as the New York Times, the Boston Review, and the Modern Language Quarterly. He teaches at Simmons College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Vaughn Sills is an associate professor of photography at Simmons College and has been a fine art photographer for more than thirty years. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, and her photography has been exhibited across the country including in twenty solo shows, most recently at the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C. Her book One Family received an Award of Excellence from the Southern Library Association. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.